There is growing evidence that cell deformability is a useful indicator of abnormal cytoskeletal changes, and may provide a label-free biomarker for determining cell states or properties, such as metastatic potential, cell cycle stage, degree of differentiation, and leukocyte activation. Clinically, a measure of metastatic potential could guide treatment decisions, or a measure of degree of differentiation could prevent transplantation of undifferentiated tumorigenic stem cells in regenerative therapies. For drug discovery and personalized medicine, a measure of cytoskeletal integrity could allow screening for cytoskeletal-acting drugs or evaluation of cytoskeletal drug resistance in biopsied samples. Cell deformability can further provide insight into mechanotransduction pathways for different cell lines, opening new avenues of discovery in cellular biomechanics. Currently, implementation of these techniques and analyses is cost-prohibitive and labor-intensive, which is a substantial limiting factor in clinical and research applications. Current platforms for cell deformation techniques and analyses suffer from a large number of limitations, including one or more of the following: limited throughput, inconsistency, limited characterization of sample heterogeneity, speed, and labor intensity. In particular, platforms optimized for biophysics research operate at rates of approximately 1 cell/minute, which significantly hampers one's ability to process and analyze a large number of heterogeneous particles.
Thus, there is a need in the cytometer field to create a new and improved system and method for deforming and analyzing particles. This invention provides such a new and improved system and method.